Considering an Underground Park in New York

An acclaimed chef and author considers a proposed park that will revitalize Manhattan's underground in more ways than one.

By

Gabrielle Hamilton

May 20, 2013 11:59 a.m. ET

ENLARGE

Illustration by Patrik Svensson

A FEW YEARS AGO I was at a dinner party at the summer home of the investment manager Boykin Curry when a fellow guest, James Ramsey, quietly opened his laptop at the table. We had briefly met in the kitchen earlier, when I was setting down a whole Serrano ham from Spain—my gift to the hosts. (Ramsey was introduced as "an architect," but we ended up speaking of the cured hams his family makes on their farm in Tennessee.) On his computer he pulled up photographs, one after the other, of abandoned underground switch stations, trolley turnarounds, sealed-off and derelict subway depots parceled under New York City—some 13 scattered acres of vaulted ceilings, tile work and embedded track curving off into dark tunnels in the distance. The spaces were so immense and cavernous that the workers and trolley cars in the photos looked like Lego pieces. Then he clicked on one, heavily tagged with graffiti, with vertical iron Y-beams like trees.

"It's been sitting there unused for 60 years. We just walked around in it last week," Ramsey said. I could have cleared a path through the wine bottles strewn across the table and crawled into the screen.

"Yeah," he said. "Incredible, right? This is the Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, an abandoned full acre under Delancey Street, just a few blocks down from your place," he said, referring to my East Village restaurant, Prune. "We're hoping to reclaim the derelict space and transform it into a park. Kinda like the High Line. But, well, like nothing else in the world—and underground."

Modeled after the innovative Promenade plantée in Paris, the High Line park in west Manhattan is built on an elevated train rail repurposed and transformed for public use—a major green space incorporating the very plant life that was already growing wild there. Opened in 2009, it brings a new experience to living in the city that feels thrilling, not shameful the way the 'new' experience of shopping at the Kmart in Astor Place felt when it opened in 1996. Where there were once grown-over tracks, Friends of the High Line put one of the most talked-about, visited and culturally referenced parks in the world. Ramsey was talking about all of that, but underground, in a strange, ironbound space that could still be a park even when it rains.

ENLARGE

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND | A now-dismantled on-site model of the Lowline.
Photo by Cameron R. Neilson courtesy the Lowline

Ramsey then showed us the technology he'd invented, by which he could harness actual sunlight through remote skylights and, through advanced optical technology, bring it to places previously inconceivable—its energy still powerful enough to allow photosynthesis to occur. It turned out this guy in flip-flops—the one I'd met in the kitchen talking knowledgeably about curing hams—had also worked as an engineer for NASA. Soon, he hoped, anyone would be able to walk three full city blocks underground—from New York's Clinton Street to Essex Street—while venturing through grass, trees, moss and sunshine. He and his cocreator, Dan Barasch, were going to make it happen. The Lowline. I thought it was just a kind of hyperbolic fiction, all that wine talking. But it made for an unforgettable dinner party.

The lingering impact of Ramsey's photos of those abandoned subterranean spaces is how they revealed a still-salvageable vestige of New York, something that hasn't yet been torn down and turned into the generic and the banal. It was like seeing a startlingly vivid apparition of an evanescent and vanished city that I still mourn the loss of, in a way. It was the New York of my coming of age in the late '70s and early '80s—the New York City of my generation.

‘Anyone would be able to walk three full city blocks underground while venturing through grass, threes, moss and sunshine.’

——Gabrielle Hamilton

It was living in a walk-up, with a decades-defunct buzzer. Friends hollering up from the street and you throwing the key down in a balled-up sock. In the sweltering summers you hung out on the fire escape, took cold showers in the tub in the kitchen and reached your wet hand through the curtain to turn off the burner under your hissing stove-top pot of Café Bustelo. In the booths at Jerry's 103 on Second Avenue, you met graffiti artists, studio artists and introverted writers who had daytime proofreading jobs and drove cabs at night and weird geeks who were screwing around with laser discs and sound mixers. You hauled lawn chairs onto the abandoned elevated train tracks at Tenth Avenue and 29th Street (where the High Line now runs) and had makeshift parties in the gravelly grown-over grasses on the trestle bridge, bathed in the orange-black air of urban nighttime.

I don't know if it was better, or if it was anyone else's ideal of the city, but it was this: uniquely itself. It was uncommon, gritty and urban. It felt like nowhere else in the country and was not easily mistaken for anywhere but New York City. The smartest, hungriest and freshest kids moved here to be a part of it. To meet others like themselves. To shape it.

And this drive was the other unmistakable, lingering feeling I'd gotten from Ramsey and his laptop.

It may not have been like 30 years ago, when the cool kids who would shape the future met each other Monday nights at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A or, later, sobering up with blintzes and coffee at the Kiev as dawn broke. But Barasch, 36—the computer-game-playing ultra smartie, who'd worked at Google and also for New York City government and who can speak in easy, fluid paragraphs about "silos of knowledge" and "curating global intelligence"—had met Ramsey, 35, here in New York, through a friend. Their work reflects the politics and aesthetics of their generation's sensibility, which is all about being green, recycling, repurposing and community building through technology. But the connection to my generation—and to all New Yorkers, both permanent and transient—is that Ramsey and Barasch's inclination toward technology, green space and community stands tall, but not so tall as to cast in shadow their dedication to art, the urban and the gritty.

"New York is a city that doesn't fetishize its own history," says Ramsey, "which is a good thing, or else it would feel like Charleston, Boston or Philadelphia—captured in amber." "But in the absence of cool, edgy initiatives like this one," observes Barasch, "what's left to move in is 7-11 and big box stores."

Aboveground, the neighborhood around Delancey Street is about to change dramatically. The city's Economic Development Corporation is finally moving forward with the Seward Park project—over 1.5 million square feet of mixed-use, who-knows-what's-coming development. The request for a proposal has been called, deadlines set. Because of this, what happens directly beneath that area, in the forgotten underground, starts to become very interesting.

ENLARGE

A section of the park's remote skylights
Photo by Lizzy Zevallos Courtesy the Lowline

IN THE INTERVENING couple of years since that summertime dinner party, Ramsey and Barasch's vision of the Lowline has become anything but fiction. There's been a Kickstarter campaign backed by 3,000 supporters. The $150,000 they raised online financed a full-scale model, with working remote skylights and parabolic dishes, which the duo and their dedicated team exhibited for a month. The campaign paid for a robust engineering study in concert with Arup—the design group behind such successes as the Sydney Opera House. There's been legal vetting; a budget and a business plan; and endorsements from community board #3, the City Council, the State Assembly and the New York State Senate. What they most need now—apart from the $55 million it will take to build—is for the MTA to let them have the space.

It may take another 5 years, or 10, but the Lowline, with its even spread of political, financial and community support, is poised to become the New Yorkiest thing to happen to New York City since the Double-Dutch tournament at the Apollo Theatre. The Lowline—smart, edgy and unique—is one of those Only–in–New York ideas, a resuscitation of the near-dead truth that New York City is a city like no other. And they won't have to tear anything down to prove it.

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